Ask HN: Are Google products getting worse?
I'm hoping to avoid an old-fashioned product-fanboy flame war, but I don't know any other forum that might notice the same things I've noticed.
I am a diehard user of Google Drive, Google Images, Google Search, Gmail, Android/Pixel UIs, etc. But over the past 3 years, I've noticed that these services are functioning more and more poorly, from lagged upload times all the way to increased delays between clicking a button in Gmail and rendering the next object. My Pixel 2 now has so many bugs I can't even keep track of them. The UIs and menus for all of these Google services get more and more hidden, convoluted, and inaccessible with every update. Google Search at this point is a joke, to be avoided unless looking for PDFs.
Am I crazy, or has anyone else noticed this trend over the past few years?
47 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadYes. But _why_ is a better question. I'd attribute it to their killing off their best products [0], but they even slow down the products they have [1].
Also - why would you keep using their products given that it's common knowledge that Google is anti-consumer in practice? The days of "don't be evil" are unfortunately behind us.
[0]: https://gcemetery.co/
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/14/google_android_data_a...
For the same reason I'd keep renting from a landlord who let me rent for free, even if they were anti-tenant.
What if they were constantly in your living room pushing crazy politics on you?
What if they refused to fix or do maintenance on the property, or they started removing rooms from the house?
What if they went to great pains to prevent you from removing anything you owned from the house?
Free can be surprisingly expensive in the long term.
Because the only realistic alternative is iPhones and those come with their own set of issues w/ not allowing sideloading, root, etc.
And the worst part about this is the fact that other search engines are taking Google's lead and results from alternative engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo are also declining in utility. Does anyone know of a search engine that doesn't use natural language processing?
Never thought it might be related to natural language search buts that’s a good theory.
My Pixel 2XL is the best Google phone I have owned. I am still using it but I will have to replace it soon due to not more updates past December and a broken screen :( I find what I need when using search and Gmail works fine for my personal mail.
But yes Google seems to always hide things that I would think should be prominently displayed
Google Search is just as good if not better than a few years ago, but Gmail is getting a little bloated with almost 800mb of RAM taken up per tab.
I think like with everything, they have phases where things are worse, but then they get better. Just like Microsoft had Vista before Windows 7, ME before XP, etc. Products have phases of exploration on how to be more useful, and then they solidify those useful features and deprecate the ones that aren't great.
If you're looking for contrast, the new Apple OS's are also getting way worse (Catalina, Big Sur), but some of the releases (SL) were great. Hopefully we're on the edge of them getting better again.
Google Search has seriously become super bad, unfortunately :(
Yeah, I remember when Bing was a joke. Joke's increasingly on Google. Google stopped hiring the best and brightest, and instead started optimizing for maximizing headcount. Product quality followed years later. It's a deep hole to dig out of, and I'm not sure the top knows how to dig in the right direction.
I still miss the "old days" Google though :(
So I guess they moved on search engine business. Time to find another search engine, feed their engine with data and see how it goes.
So far no complaints on their other products in GCP platforms or drive or store or firebase or domains or app engine or big query or photos.
Wait browser based photo UI need to be updated seriously. There are so many photos, they could have options to list them up like folders each month and what folder they were from Android like it's downloads, watsapp or camera like seggregate like that, listing them all together in thumbnails in scrolling hell. They need to improve that, I hope they improve before their upgrade next year
-Android 11 is the buggiest and least stable version since the early days, with hangs and UI glitches constantly.
-Youtube doesn't let me submit feedback, I actually get a 403 everytime for almost two years, and recommendations have been broken for over 3 years
-Google news only will show 20 articles from the US, and not offer more, despite there being hundreds a day.
Pick a product and there are major issues they just don't seem to care about.
My experience has been that the GMail interface is slow, and I'm tired of it nagging me to install the GMail app. If I wanted to install the GMail app, I'd use my phone, not my computer.
GMail's spam filtering was best-of-class years ago. That's why so many people switched to it. But now it's mediocre at best. I can only shake my head and wonder how some of the so visibly obvious spam messages get through.
In keeping with the spirit of the OP, I'm not going to recommend a better option. They're out there. And with GMail getting worse by the month, it's worth keeping your eyes on the competition to see when you might want to make the switch, too.
Google Search is also supposed to be terrible. I don't use it, but my wife does and she complains about it all the time.
Recently she was searching for information about drinking white wine with beer. It's supposed to be a thing in New Orleans. She wasn't able to find anything but ads and places selling white wine and/or beer.
Right now, searching Google for "white wine and beer" and "new orleans" I get a blog post about Christmas in Australia, "Beer Drinking African American" stock photo, Pinterest spam about beer buckets, and a bunch more blog spam. Nothing useful. I see no reason to go back to Google for anything.
Can you describe this more? I'm unaware of any official-from-Google GMail app for desktops.
http://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com/2014/06/boozing-with-brod...
which suggests that besides one line in a movie, this isn't a thing that exists in reality. So... what else should be returned? Other websites that describe how this combination doesn't exist?
It doesn't have to return anything else. Just the entry you listed would be fine. But for me, and for my wife, that is not in the results.
Remember that your Google results are not the same as anyone else's. It's spent billions to "tailor" the results for each human on the planet. At the same time, making the results worthless.
Just to demonstrate the effect to myself I took a VPN connnection to France and voilà, very useful hits.
That's the geographic dimension of the search bubble. I am sure there are more.
(I never use Google search when I am logged in to Google and I delete my cookies at least daily. So things should be pretty neutral for me. Someone might say, hah, your fault. If you hadn't subverted their profiling you'd get better results. I doubt that, I had not heard about that French city before and I certainly search more Finnish pages than French ones.)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-gmail/pbm...
Had to systematically use Alt-Cmd-Shift-V to workaround it (paste without formatting), as this is the only option around mentioned in forums...
Anyone has the same weird behavior here ?
(Google, please fix it!)
I am old enough to remember the last time that happened, IE killed Netscape and left web development in stalemate. Chrome changed that and continues to push it forward till this day. It also gave birth to V8 engine and Node.js. IMO, we owe open web to Google Chrome.
In other cases it is as if, whenever possible, google will choose an interpretation that best suits some ideological interest rather than the most useful.